Last night was the launch of Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. I was asked to play the drums in a special little performance to which I obliged most excitingly!

I played on hard – which might have impressive if it wasn’t 7 Nation Army. Meg White is such a simple drummer she probably couldn’t even play hard on her own song…

I dressed as Casey Lynch – the blonde rocker character from the GH series.

Photographs done by the rocker-photog himself Tony Mott. Coincidently, he shot my very first photo shoot in 2005 for Channel [V]’s Fresh Meat presenter search in a butcher shop with hanging meat carcasses. He remembered that I was dry-reaching the entire shoot. Bless him.

Pretty damn excited to start reading the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

I’ve heard so many good things about the 3 books (the 3rd instalment ‘Mockingjay’ came out only yesterday!), and the books always came up in the ‘if you like that book, then you’ll love THIS book’ pop-up, pretty much guaranteeing that these are my kind of books!

I’ve been playing this game less than a week and have clocked 18 hours so far. I’ll be filming a piece on it for the Nintendo channel available on the home page of the Wii in weeks to come. I thought I’d write up a little review on my first impression.

The first thing you notice are the graphics, the well-laid out maps and the depth of the game. You are a Celestial (read angel with wings and a halo), who’s job is to protect a city as their guardian. You rise up the ranks quickly amongst your peers and are able to help unassisted somewhat too early in your training. By helping the punters you gain ‘benevolence’, their gratitude essentially, and you offer this up to the mighty tree that the Celestians worship. Once this tree receives enough benevolence, it bears fruit with incredible powers. Yippee! Except the beyond-mortal-realm train decides to crash down into the tree taking all the rare fruit (called fyggs) a few Celestians with it to the mortal world. Yes, you are one of them. When you wake up you have no halo (gasp!) no wings (eek!) and worst of all – HUMANS CAN NOW SEE YOU. Oh dear. Not good. You have no way of teleporting back to your homeland. Time to suck it up, human.

The fun kicks in when you get to select the weapon you choose to use, and upgrade your armour. They creators have had so much fun with this – as you can go down the traditional route and wear chain mail, shell armour etc, or you can deck out your companions in a pair of trackkies, pop your cute mage girl in a sun-dress, fishnet stockings and high heels or make your thief wear his bright blue speedos that even Tony Abbott would be proud of.

Also, the monsters you fight are downright hilarious and have the best names. You fight guys like this

and this:

I like that you don’t have random unsuspecting battles (until you hit the water on the boat) and that you can visibly see your enemy and are able to side-step them should you choose not to fight them. WIN.

I also like that there is usually clear direction on where you need to go next, and what you need to do

The side-quests are usually available if you seek out the blue speech bubbles. The tasks are never really tedious – except when you get one from a cat. A CAT. It just meowed at me, and now I’m supposed to know what to do? I’ve been speaking to every known cow (moo), dog (nn nnnnn) and cat I’ve seen and NOTHING.

It’s like a lot of roaming RPG’s where you have to constantly battle (otherwise known as ‘grinding’) to gain items, experience and coin. Like all grinders it can get a little repetitive – especially if you’re trying to battle a boss and you know that all the side-stepping of minions has come to bite you in the ass so you have to go back and do it anyway to level up.

Very similar elements to Pokemon where you search and area, talk to the characters in it, fight medial monsters to gain XP until you are ready to face the boss of the certain area- but they have a really earnest story behind it. The cut scenes aren’t painfully long and you really grow love for your 3 other comrades (which are human and do not live in pokeballs). The only problem is how these fellow fighters came about. I literally selected them from a lady who prides herself on matchmaking. So I chose 3 other people, selected their class, gender and looks, named them, and they became real. Huh? But why do they want to travel around distant lands pledging their life to me? Why do they support me? I wish they had more of a back story, or had more of a reason to join in than because ‘I made them’. Literally, figuratively and emotionally.

My ‘pick n mix’ team insists of:

Maude: (me) (no shit) who is a Minstrel with blond hair, blue eyes and who’s weapon of choice is a sword. (Not predictable at all, right?)

Lachy: Theif (named after the ‘locks’ that I thought he would pick) and he is a flaming ranga with blue eyes and a nifty poison-tipped dagger as his weapon.

Tress: mage (short for ‘enchantress’) and has blue hair with amber eyes. She rocks the magical staff, a turban, a white bra and hooker heels. This lass is going places, and fast.

One other observation is the heavy recycling of village people – in every town you’ll see the same 10 people used over and over again: The young lady, the maiden, the priest, the old man and woman with the walking stick, the young boy with the blonde bowl cut etc. I would have liked to have seen slightly more variation. But I’m sure I’m the only one who’s noticed this!

Overall this game is easy to play, and hard to put down. Looking forward to pumping a lot of hours into it!